At some point you may have heard someone say that for gaming you need X amount of cores. Examples include "6 is more than enough cores," or "you need a minimum of 8 cores for gaming," let's address that misconception.
Quantum computers are beginning to emerge in many industry and research labs. But what are qubits? And are the challenges ahead to control the quantum properties of our universe and leverage that for computing?
Direct3D. OpenAL. Winsock. You've probably heard of these and you might have even used them before. We're talking about APIs – the golden fleece to programmers around the world. Join us as we explain just what an API is, and take a quick look at where and how they get used.
The 3D games we play and love are all made up of thousands, if not millions, of colored straight lines, which inevitably will look jagged in our screens if not for smoothing anti-aliasing techniques. Let us explain in this new deep dive.
A checksum is a number, in the form of a binary or hexadecimal value, that's been derived from a data source. The important bits to know are that it's typically much smaller than the source, and it's also almost entirely unique.
Adaptive sync display technologies from Nvidia and AMD have been on the market for a few years now and gained plenty of popularity with gamers thanks to a generous selection of monitors with plenty of options and a variety of budgets.
Computer technology is no strange to acronyms: CPU, RAM, SSD, to name but a few. Ever so often, new ones appear on the scene in the never-ending quest to improve the capabilities of our computing devices. Today we'll explain processor instruction set extensions MMX, SSE, and AVX.
When it comes to computing devices, the headlines tend to go to biggest and fastest, but not always. Say hello to Arduino, a project that has inspired millions around the world to get into the vast ocean of electronics and programming.
#TBT By far the most common types of display panels used on PC monitors are TN, IPS and VA. We're sure you've heard these terms before if you've researched monitors to purchase, and to be clear, the type of panel is a key piece of information that reveals a lot about how the monitor will behave and perform.
For 25 years, the USB port has been a faithful old friend, connecting and powering our everyday gadgets and peripherals. But how exactly does it that happen? Welcome to our explainer on the inner workings of USB, and a look at how it's managed to survive for so long when others have come and gone.
With technology advancing so rapidly around us, sometimes misconceptions can work their way into our common understanding. In this article, we'll take a step back and go over some of the most common things people get wrong when talking about computer hardware.
Every single CPU found in any computer, from a cheap laptop to a million-dollar server, will have something called cache. It must be important, otherwise why would it be there? But what does cache do?
Wi-Fi is set to get better and faster. While plenty of routers are already available with chips using draft specifications, 802.11ax Wi-Fi was not finalized until late 2019, ushering in a wave of updated devices touting new wireless capabilities that will contribute toward next-generation networks with more speed and less congestion.
Nvidia has been making graphics chips that feature extra cores, beyond the normal ones used for shaders. Known as tensor cores, these mysterious units can be found in thousands of system, but what exactly are they and what are they used for? Today we'll explain what a tensor is and how tensor cores are used in the world of graphics and deep learning.
Every once in a while, a video game is made that becomes part of the industry's history. For PC gamers, there's one title that's almost legendary thanks to its incredible, ahead-of-its-time graphics and ability to grind PCs into single digit frame rates. Join us as we take a look back at Crysis and see what made it so special.
Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer systems that automatically improve with experience, a hot topic in the last few years, but a concept that's been around for decades. IBM programmer and AI pioneer Arthur Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1952.
The vast majority of visual effects you see in games today depend on the clever use of lighting and shadows – without them, games would be dull and lifeless. In this fourth part of our deep look at 3D game rendering, we'll focus on what happens to a 3D world alongside processing vertices and applying textures. It once again involves a lot of math and a sound grasp of the fundamentals of optics.
The first 3D graphics cards appeared 25 years ago and since then their power and complexity have grown at a scale greater than any other microchip found in a PC. In going from one million to billions of transistors, smaller dies, and consuming more power, the capabilities of these behemoths is immeasurably greater, but what can we learn about efficiency?
Without properly managing heat, our electronic systems would destroy themselves or conversely, we'd be severely limiting our computing capabilities. This article will touch on the basic science of heat, how and why it is generated in electronics, and the various methods we have developed to control it.
#ThrowBackThursday We all think of the CPU as the "brains" of a computer, but what does that actually mean? What is going on inside with the billions of transistors to make your computer work? In this new four-part mini series we'll be focusing on computer hardware design, covering the ins and outs of what makes a computer work.
Video game physics are something that we often take for granted. Programming physics into a game can be as simple as one or two routines, or as complex as requiring a separate physics engine to handle the computations. In this article we'll delve into the specifics of rigid body and soft body physics in games.
Inside the latest graphics cards lies a large graphics processor, packed with billions of transistors, all running at clock speeds unthinkable a decade ago. Welcome to our architectural comparison of the newest GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.
In this third part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what can happen to the 3D world after the vertex processing has done and the scene has been rasterized. The majority of the visual effects seen in games today are down to the clever use of textures – without them, games would dull and lifeless. So let's get dive in and see how this all works!
In this second part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what happens to the 3D world after all of the vertex processing has finished. We'll need to dust off our math textbooks again, grapple with the geometry of frustums, and ponder the puzzle of perspectives. We'll also take a quick dive into the physics of ray tracing, lighting and materials – excellent!
In this first part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing entirely on the vertex stage of the process. This means dragging out our math textbooks, brushing up on a spot of linear algebra, matrices, and trigonometry – oh yeah!
